The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

by Dan Barber

  The beloved cuisine, and the farming system that supported it, didn’t last. They disappeared—first, as larger-scale farms that supplied produce to the East Coast expanded and overtook the market in the 1800s, and then in a more complete sense during the Civil War, when nearly 112,000 acres of rice fields were abandoned. With the advent of chemical fertilizers, farmers abandoned time-consuming rotations and focused on money-producing staple crops. Pest problems developed, which gave way to the need for pesticides. Soil health declined.

  There were other problems, too. California and New Jersey became the main produce-supplying states. Corn and wheat moved to the Midwest, further depressing prices for the once profitable southern crops. David Wesson’s method of turning cottonseed into cooking oil solidified cotton as a staple crop, ending the era of experimental agriculture altogether. By the start of the Great Depression, Carolina Gold, the rice Glenn’s mother cherished, had all but vanished.

  When Glenn, a California surfer with a talent for the French horn and mathematics, accepted a full scholarship to the University of North Carolina, he was reunited with the cuisine of his youth. He began sending packages of grits, wheat, and—when he could find it—native rice to his mother in California. But it wasn’t what she remembered.

  “It sucks, is what she’d say,” Glenn said. “So I started sending what looked like really good collards, and occasionally field peas. But she never liked anything. The flavors had disappeared.”

  It was then that Glenn began to grasp the ramifications of what had happened—the disappearance not just of certain flavors, but of a whole way of cooking. The Smithsonian dinner and the research he did afterward only crystallized his understanding.

  “The idea that everything had disappeared was unacceptable,” he told me, explaining his decision to leave the hotel business. “It was that simple. It just clicked. I knew what I needed to do.”

  Glenn started Anson Mills in 1998. “I began with the notion that Anson Mills would repatriate, grow, and sell rice. No feasibility studies, no forecasts, no budget. I was so proud. And so ignorant. After a few weeks, I discovered that no one had any rice seed. Because no one was growing rice! Um, duh . . . ,” he told me, smacking his forehead.

  Glenn quickly adjusted, deciding to grow heirloom corn for grits. He predicted that eventually he would earn enough to begin the long and expensive process of growing rice. “It was a sub-moronic plan,” he said. “But that was my plan.”

  He soon discovered that heirloom corn seeds were also in short supply.

  So Glenn sought out moonshiners in the region, figuring that their illicit distilleries used corn they themselves had grown and passed down through generations. His mother reminded him that the best grits from her childhood came from the coast. “So of course I went to the coast,” he said, nodding dutifully. “Who knew bootleggers worked the coast? Well, Mom did—and they do.”

  He found one moonshine operation completely “off the grid.” The family had been farming the same land since the late 1600s. But this wasn’t just a moonshine operation. The family also raised pigs, goats, and sheep. And they grew countless crops for food. Everything was intertwined, and everything grew together.

  “So, you didn’t have field peas as field peas; you’d have field peas and corn together in the same field. You didn’t grow just wheat; you’d grow wheat that was, say, thirty inches tall, and then you maybe grow rye above it that was seven feet tall; harvest the rye first, cut it high, then cut low for the wheat, and then they’d have clover down at the bottom, or winter peas, or whatever. No one thing was growing in a field.”

  It was unlike anything Glenn had ever seen. “Like an idiot, I said to the father, ‘You can’t machine this.’ By that I meant you couldn’t run a tractor combine to harvest it. He looks at me real funny and says, ‘Why would we want to machine this? This is eating food.’ He wasn’t growing for animals. He was saying, ‘This is our kitchen food. This is what we eat.’ He would just as soon run a combine on his field as he would grow GM [genetically modified] corn. These people were frozen in time.”

  Glenn ate lunch with them. “Holy crap! I mean, everything on the table—everything—had been grown and processed on the farm,” he said. “It was unbelievable food. Breads, butters, jams, hams, even wine—you name it. Oh, the best corn grits I’d ever eaten. Unreal, impeccable flavor, simply and honestly prepared. I sat there with the bootlegging family in the middle of this food paradise and felt in reality what my mother had always said about southern kitchen gardens, and about the food she grew up on. A terrific feeling came over me. It was a wonderful epiphany, the realization that my mother had been right.”

  The family agreed to sell him some corn seed, and even allowed him to grow it on their land. Glenn calculated the size of the crop based on a profit that would allow him to begin growing rice.

  The corn he harvested that first year was delicious, but the yields were low. And since Glenn was hand-milling it to make grits, the price was high. Supermarkets and even specialty retail stores balked at the price and were befuddled by Glenn’s insistence that the fresh grits be refrigerated.

  “The store managers looked at me like I was from outer space. Refrigerate grits? They had never heard of fresh-milled anything, so the idea that it could spoil, that it would spoil very quickly, was absolutely foreign. I wasn’t just selling heirloom grits, which people had heard about from their grandparents. I had the flavorful grits and the fresh milling process to preserve that flavor. You couldn’t have one without the other. No one knew what the hell that meant. Grits were grits.”

  Glenn knew he needed a language to describe the quality of his crop, and he needed a market that spoke that language. So he called on chefs, approaching them as if he were a boutique winery selling sommeliers a limited selection of the very best of a vintage. Some southern chefs bought the grits, but their reach was local, and back in the 1990s the high-end southern restaurant market was small. Then he called chef Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, in Napa Valley, widely considered one of the best restaurants in the United States.

  When he began his pitch about his premium grits, Keller interrupted him. “I can’t sell grits,” he said. Glenn proposed artisanal polenta, and at that, Keller was interested. Glenn promised to send some fresh-milled organic polenta from corn-seed stock that originated with the Native Americans.

  “He agreed to try it,” Glenn said, “which is when I knew I had the sale. Because once chefs try this stuff, once they cook it and taste it, it’s sold. A chef like Thomas Keller has a vetting process that relies on his tongue. It’s the final word.”

  Glenn was right. A week later, it was on the French Laundry menu. And within a few months, other chefs around the country called about the polenta. Anson Mills began to appear on menus and in cookbook recipes. Glenn’s business started to grow.

  Then another problem. The bootlegging family, which by this time had virtually adopted Glenn, told him he couldn’t just grow corn in a field by itself. In order to produce great-tasting corn—and one day produce great-tasting rice—they said he’d have to start growing other crops and selecting rotations to boost soil fertility.

  “Even though—and this is just too ironic almost to mention—surrounding me was the family’s farm, with unreal crop diversity, the incredible soil tilth, and the stunningly drop-dead-delicious food that came out of all that diversity, I just never put it together,” Glenn said. “How thick can you be?” (I didn’t mention that I’d never put it together, either, until I met Klaas.)

  Glenn surveyed social club and church archives and collected oral histories from local cooks, farmers, and the community of commercial Sea Island fishermen, to develop a catalog of ingredients from the nineteenth-century rice kitchen.

  Which is when he realized he had also missed the point of the Carolina Rice Kitchen.

  The southern obsession for rice may seem single-minded, but in fact
it was built on a whole system of interrelated crops. After the soil crisis of the early 1800s, farmers had learned which plants and animals worked well together. Buckwheat, peas, corn, barley, rye, sweet potatoes, sesame, collards, and livestock worked in tandem to improve the soil and produce superior harvests.

  Farmers discovered, for example, that rotating sweet potatoes and sesame after a rice harvest helped boost rice yields and suppress disease and pests the following year. So new varieties of sweet potatoes were bred for better flavor and better yield. The rotations continued to improve and, along with them, the Carolina Gold rice. Favored for its delicate grains, Carolina Gold was exported to China, Indonesia, Spain, and even France, where legendary French chefs like Marie-Antoine Carême and Auguste Escoffier made it famous.

  “Crème de riz? That was a dessert based on the sweetness of the rice. The sweetness was helped along by the soil fertility, which came from the proper rotations,” Glenn told me.

  Seeking to diversify his system, Glenn planted field peas to supply nitrogen for the soil. He settled on the Sea Island red pea, because he remembered his mother describing it as an ingredient in one of her favorite rice dishes—Hoppin’ John, a staple southern dish of rice and beans. The recipe most likely emerged from successful plantings of beans followed by rice.

  Soon Glenn added barley and rye to his rotations, and Anson Mills expanded into peas and other grains. As his company grew, Glenn was finally able to begin investing his profits in rice. Only, just as before, he first had to find the seeds.

  There were once more than a hundred varieties of Carolina Gold rice grown in the Lowcountry, but by the time Glenn came along, they were gone.

  “So I had to start over,” he said. He obtained seeds for Carolina Gold from a seed bank at the Texas Rice Improvement Association, but upon growing them out he realized that they didn’t express the characteristics he was seeking. After decades of neglect, the rice more closely resembled Carolina White, a related—but less delicious—variety.

  Glenn called the top rice geneticists in the country, one by one, and explained what he was after—to repatriate the rice culture of the Carolina Rice Kitchen and replicate the flavor of what once was the most sought-after rice in the world. He asked for their help in tracking down and identifying the right genes. The response was tepid and often dismissive.

  “They were all preparing rice for market—shelf-stable, machine-milled rice—the kind of stuff my mother said tasted like vitamin pills. They weren’t thinking about the potential for flavor if you kept the bran intact, and the dimensions of that in breeding.”

  Glenn quickly learned how little geneticists think about nuances of flavor. “They talk about mouthfeel, they talk about millability, they talk about cookability, but they never get back to flavor profiles, beyond the idea of ‘aromatic’ rice,” he said. “They use the same note with various volumes, but the note never changes. It’s one gene, and it’s the only gene they talk about.”

  Carolina Gold is categorized as a “non-aromatic rice,” meaning it doesn’t exude the perfume of, say, jasmine rice. But Glenn found that a few of his best harvests, hand-milled to his exacting specifications, produced floral and nutty aromas. And through his research, he knew that soil variation and even water quality could cause those flavors to express themselves differently.

  “All of our rices in the South had distinct flavors according to which river they were grown on and how the soil was managed,” he told me. “There were people on record who could tell where rice came from just by tasting it. They could tell you which river it was grown on—even what part of the river it was grown on.”

  Glenn did what his mother had taught him to do—he cooked different varieties of rice and described their flavor to the geneticists. The scientists, some of whom had worked with rice all their lives, learned about characteristics they had never considered. Working with the geneticists to breed for his system, he pushed the flavor to become better expressed. And, in the meantime, he began doing more of his own seed work in the field, painstakingly selecting varieties of Carolina Gold from a large pool of possibilities, winnowing out what didn’t meet his specifications for a flavor ingrained in his mother’s memory.

  “I became a breeder,” he told me. “I mean, I had no choice.”

  It was almost by accident that Glenn added wheat to his rotations.

  “I liked to ask older southern ladies what they thought of my grits. A few of them said, ‘Yeah, great, but where’s the graham flour for my graham biscuits?’ I was like, What? Biscuits made with whole wheat flour?”

  Glenn was surprised. Everyone knew southern biscuits were made with white flour. He told the ladies they could get whole wheat flour from the large mill just outside of town. But they said they didn’t want whole wheat flour; they wanted graham flour.

  “As far as I knew,” Glenn said, “graham flour was just another name for whole wheat flour. But one day, out of the blue, while I was waiting to pick up my dry cleaning, I remembered Mom talking about graham biscuits. It just popped into my mind. I asked a few of the ladies working there—they were all like ninety years old—if they remember having graham flour as children. ‘Oh, yes!’ they said, ‘graham biscuits. We lived on them.’ I nearly fell on the floor.”

  Glenn researched the history of graham flour in the South, which was when he learned that wheat was part of nearly every kitchen plot rotation. The nineteenth-century southern kitchen gardens brought Sylvester Graham’s ideas to reality. Wheat was initially grown to restore carbon lost from the rice harvest, but the farmers selected a variety called Red May for its flavor. Traditionally, after the wheat berries were harvested, they were milled in the yard with a hand grinder called a quern. Biscuits—and, later, things like Triscuits and graham crackers—were made from this home-milled wheat. White flour biscuits were in fact a rare indulgence, or they were part of wealthy white southerners’ tables.

  “I knew we had to try it,” Glenn said. “We grew the Red May, milled it nice and coarse, and made graham flour for biscuits. It was friggin’ extraordinary.”

  CHAPTER 28

  I ARRIVED IN CHARLESTON, South Carolina, on a warm and muggy morning in early July. Glenn picked me up just outside the terminal in a small rental car. “It’s all I do, rental cars,” he told me, “I’ll drive it for a few days and then run in and change cars.”

  Glenn is an oddity, even in a place like the Lowcountry, where eccentrics grow like beautiful weeds. He is tall and silver-haired, with an expression forever on the brink of enthusiasm. On this particular day, he wore khakis and a short-sleeved white polo shirt, looking very much like a man on the way to a Sunday outing at the yacht club. To be fair, we were on our way to Clemson University’s Coastal Research and Education Center, which for Glenn is a little like a weekend getaway. Anson Mills donates money to the university, and, in return, the university provides land for Glenn’s crop experiments.

  As we drove, he excitedly outlined the day’s itinerary, and I was quickly reminded of his habit of dispensing information in rapid-fire bursts of arcane facts and dizzying non sequiturs. Glenn drops names and historical events as though you should know them, but shrugging as he does it, as if he doesn’t mean any harm. And he doesn’t. He delights in surprising people. His thirst for knowledge is matched only by his desire to show it off. He can tell you about water-driven machinery (he worked for a time as a doffer in a twine factory), topology (his major in college), the diaspora (not the Jewish one, but the Abenaki Native American one), and his recent interest in John Letts (a British archaeobotanist who documents the history of cereals). A conversation with Glenn can feel like an airplane flight interrupted by fierce, inexplicable episodes of turbulence.

  A simple question, like the one I asked soon after I got into the car—“Since I’m in Charleston, would it be possible to visit that family who helped you get started growing your corn?”—led to Glenn mentioning something c
alled the ATF, followed by a short history of South Carolina market farming in the 1820s, the observations of Harder, and then suddenly to an extended arm and a “By the way, if we were to follow this road here, the destination would bring us to Doc Pasaventos’s olive trees on Folly Island.”

  ATF? Harder? Doc Pasaventos? I picked one. “Harder?” I asked.

  “Jules Harder,” he said. “Which is what I meant by the reference to the Bradshaw collection.”

  “I don’t know Jules Harder,” I said (but wondered about the meaning of the Bradshaw collection, which he had never mentioned before).

  “Harder was the chef of Delmonico’s,” Glenn said, in the way of a gentle reminder. “In the early 1870s.”

  Clarity remained a far-off cousin to whatever exchange we were having. I tried to climb my way back to where I started. “What about visiting the farm family of yours . . .”

  “That’s what I’m saying: not a good idea to discuss, the ATF notwithstanding.”

  We arrived in front of a large padlocked gate. I asked what ATF stood for. “Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,” he said, referring to the fact that the family had an illegal moonshine operation—not to the place we had just arrived.

  I shook off the exchange as Glenn tapped the steering wheel and smiled broadly at the large, open fields on either side of us. “Welcome to the second-oldest farming research center established after the revolution,” he said. “Way cool.”

  Glenn sped along one of the enormous fields and spoke excitedly, if not altogether clearly, about an ongoing experiment with cowpeas. “We’ve got fourteen varieties of peas doing allelopathic suppression and fertility,” he said. “We mix up the varieties, which is mass population genetics. This is all prep for wheat. No clover, that’s the goal. Because we’re gonna do total legume wheat.”